Michael Wood

Nothing in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew quite lives up to its first few minutes, but getting anywhere near them is quite an achievement. And this static, mysterious movie, now showing at the BFI as part of a Pasolini season, becomes quite hectic at the end, as if impatient to finish, to run away from a story it now finds crowded rather than interesting....

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is based, a title-card tells us, on ‘first-hand accounts’, but it’s not a documentary film. It’s a sort of revenge western, clean, elegant, relentless. Loved ones are killed, a lone hero, in this case a heroine, sets out to find the killer or the man behind the killing; finds him, has him executed. Bigelow and her writer Mark...

This year’s discussions of the Oscar nominations, especially before they were announced, centred on the notion of American history and managed somehow to suggest that this is both a very strange subject for mainstream movies to take on and something they do all the time. Slaves are freed in Lincoln, a slave takes operatic revenge in Django Unchained, Osama bin Laden is traced and killed...

There’s a lot of waiting in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln: for news, for a decision, for a vote, for an opinion, for the end of the Civil War. Not much happens during the waiting. People articulate positions, let us know what they stand for. Lincoln himself doesn’t say much. He listens, does quite a bit of walking off down lonely corridors, plays with his small son, gets...

‘Profonde Albertine’, the narrator writes close to the end of Proust’s novel. By ‘deep’ – profonde – he means ‘unreachable’. She was mostly that when she was alive, and has assumed this quality as a permanent attribute now that she is dead. But he can still be tortured by his memories of all he didn’t know, for a while at least:...